Peer Pressure By Zz Packer

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Yolonda Easiley Mr. Philips English 1113 Essay # 4 July 24, 2012 Evil Can peer pressure make a person become evil without them knowing? In this essay I will speak on how easy it is to change a person’s moral conscience. Also are humans just pure evil from birth and if the right person comes along can that bring that evil nature that is in us to the surface? Humans are born to serve, so having an authority figures commanding us to do an evil act, in my opinion, it is peer pressure that most likely will be followed. In the short story, written by ZZ Packer, litter black girls are prime examples of how one can become engaged in acts of evil through peer pressure. Arnetta in this story is seen as the authority figure, she controls most…show more content…
They throw all their morals out the window, people trust the ones who are in charge because we were brainwash to believe that leaders can be trusted and they have our best interest in head. When you are a child and you are in grade school, you tend to gravitate to someone with a take charge attitude, even if those people’s motives are evil. In the short story Brownies, there is a character named Snot, she was her own individual but somehow still followed along with the ways of Arnetta, when the girls were going to have a secret meeting to discuss what they were going to do about the white girls, Snot was pressured into going along with the group, Arnetta said “Snot, you’re not going to be a bitch and tell Mrs. Margolin, are you?” Snot tries to speak against it by saying, “Hey, maybe you didn’t hear them right –I mean-“ but then Arnetta, the authority figure interrupted saying “Are you gonna tell on us or not?” Snot eventually caved in and went with the majority group. (Packer 507) Also with the Milgram’s experiment the subjects tried to speak up against the authority but failed when the authority figure told them to shack the person again. “In each case, the actors sitting on the chair kept protesting, screaming, exhibiting excruciating pain. But the subject went ahead on the insistence of the experimenter.” (Jha 436) Does this make the followers that help in the evil act, evil as the authority that tells them to do it? No, they might not be as evil as the leader but someone inside of them they have the desire to do evil, if they did not, they would have been strong enough to go against anything that they believe not to be moral by their

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